May 13, 2018
Avner Cohen
The following is an excerpt from Ha’aretz
Excerpt: For more than four decades, Iran has had an ongoing romance with the bomb, but it has not obtained a nuclear weapon. It should be made clear that Iran has not managed to develop a nuclear bomb not because it wasn’t up to the technology. On the contrary, Iran, like North Korea, could have handily dealt with the technological challenge. It was just a few months away from its first nuclear bomb on the eve of signing the nuclear agreement with the world powers in 2015.
[…]The importance of the 2015 nuclear deal is that it solidified Iran’s non-nuclear status. Tehran committed itself not to develop nuclear weapons as long as the agreement was in force. If the non-proliferation treaty was vague on the dividing line between what is and what isn’t permitted, the nuclear agreement clearly defined it, which brings us to U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the agreement.
Trump’s decision is more damaging to the agreement than meets the eye. […] Trump is even prepared to do damage to the foundations of the transatlantic alliance, which has been the basis of the world order since the end of World War II, just to prevail over his European allies and force them to also abandon the agreement. He is easily prepared to destroy what exists without proposing a positive alternative, other than a vague aggressive assurance that he has the capacity to bring Iran to its knees and to achieve a better deal.
Continue reading at Ha’aretz
